1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communications systems. More particularly, the invention relates to computer software for a computer controlled electronic messaging system using structured response objects and virtual mailboxes.
2. Description of Prior Art
Electronic messaging (including E-mail and voice mail) has recently experienced a surge in popularity and is now commonly employed by both business people and consumers for a wide variety of tasks. Because electronic messaging systems automate the delivery and storage of information, they simplify the task of communicating and of keeping track of communications. While much of the literature treats messaging as the conveyance of information from one party to one or more other parties, messages are often used as parts of larger, more complicated transactions. For example, a message that invites attendees to a meeting is likely to request a reply indicating the attendee's availability. The sender of that message has not only conveyed the desire for the attendee's attendance, but initiated a transaction that could continue up until the time of the meeting. During that time, the attendee may or may not respond to the initial message. If the attendee does respond, the sender may compile responses from several attendees, decide upon a time and re-respond with a new meeting time, possibly including an additional RSVP. The attendee may change his availability in the meantime, and the process could begin again. If the attendee chooses not to respond to any of the messages, the sender may initiate a reminder. All of these steps are part of the same transaction, and they are all done with messages. But, except for message delivery and storage, the transaction is entirely manual and left to the memory and decisions of the users.
As the popularity of electronic messaging has grown, so has the number of messages sent and received by its users. The number of messages is expected to increase even more in the future. Additionally, messaging systems have promoted free-form communications by its users. Although the message headers may be somewhat standardized and structured, the body of messages has remained unstructured, left entirely up to the sender of the message. Because of the large amount of messages received, there is now substantial attention being paid to methods for increasing the efficiency of processing and organizing messages. One of the methods receiving attention is "structured response objects". Structure response objects include buttons, menus, and formatted fields of other objects that the sender can include in the body of the message, and can trigger a variety of functions when manipulated by the recipient. One common function of these objects is to send a reply of predetermined content back to the sender. Recently a limited number of messaging systems (primarily email) systems has introduced structured object responses to coax the recipient responses into a predetermined organization. For example, both Lotus Notes Mail.TM. and MicroSoft Exchange.TM. let the sender insert button and other response objects. Structured response objects have several advantages. First they can reduce the amount of time and effort spent by the recipient while responding to the message. Secondly, structured responses can enforce more consistency in the reply content, which can help the sender and recipient to organize, filter and potentially perform processing automatically on replies.
Electronic messaging systems can be further enhanced using a "virtual mailbox" in which the content of messages is maintained on a central server while a "personalized pointer" is actually transmitted to a user's station. For electronic mail, the pointer consists of a Uniform Resource Locator which when invoked by the user displays the content of the message. For voicemail, the pointer could consist of an electronic bridge to a virtual mailbox controller, and thus be invisible to the user. Personalizing the pointer and message to the recipient is an improvement over current practice of mailing a URL, not the message, to a recipient for review. Maintaining the message content on a server, rather than sending it to the user's station has a number of advantages. One advantage is that much of the actual processing in a response processing, content modification and status management can be done on a single machine. Another advantage is the server makes the messaging system platform independent.
Prior art related to electronic messaging is as follows:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,918,588 issued Apr. 17, 1990, discloses an office automation system which provides electronic access to images of documents by a plurality of users. An image access subsystem provides office automation applications access to images stored in a variety of storage mediums such as microfilm, microfiche, optical disks and the like. The access system uses a hardware controller to handle the complexity of retrieval of images from image storage devices. A relational data base system organizes the stored images to provide flexible access to the images and isolate any effects of reconfiguration of the image storage system.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,050,077 issued Sep. 17, 1991, discloses a method of scheduling meetings which permits an operator to select desired times, dates, and attendees and automatically determine appropriate meeting times despite the non-availability of a meeting time which complies with all of the operator's requirements. A prompting screen is provided to a meeting scheduler with blanks for keying in desired times, dates, and prospective attendees for the meeting. The attendees' key in to this screen and a comparison is made with the calendar of events for each attendee. As a result of the non-availability of a meeting time, which complies with the desired dates, times and attendees, these factors are "relaxed" to achieve an acceptable meeting time. An option list of meeting times is then presented to the scheduler for selection of a meeting time. Based upon the selection of the scheduler, a meeting notification screen is constructed for transmittal to the attendees.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,012 issued Nov. 17, 1992, discloses a software package that allows a user to store a current screen display for recall at a later time or to add additional textual annotation to a current screen display and store the annotated screen for recall at a later time. A reminder message can be saved without exiting or ending the currently executing process. The display can be text, electronic mail messages, graphics, screen displays, single screen displays, or multiple screen displays. Certain types of reminders are automatically updated when the data from which they were created is updated so that the most current version is always displayed.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,491,626 issued Feb. 13, 1996, and filed Jun. 16, 1993, discloses a computer system for scheduling an event when the event has required definitional information such as a distribution list, number of attendees, list of supplies, hardware, etc. The required information is stored on the computer system and associated with a graphical object which may be dragged and dropped on to an event schedule for appropriate searching of facilities that match the required meeting needs.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,511,197 issued Apr. 23, 1996, and filed Nov. 13, 1992, discloses a method and system for passing pointers to objects as parameters in a remote procedural call in a computer network environment. A service process passes to a client process a pointer to an interface of an object. The server marshals a pointer to the interface and sends the marshalled pointer to the client. The client process unmarshalls the pointer and accesses the passed object using the unmarshalled pointer. The marshalling and unmarshalling techniques load code and generate data structures to support the accessing of the object by the client.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,333,266 issued Jul. 26, 1994 discloses a multimedia messaging system in which message information processed and stored by any of a plurality of interconnected electronic mail systems can be accessed from any system. The messaging system comprises a plurality of file servers each coupled to a plurality of work stations. Each file server includes a message store as well as a message pointer store. The message pointer store includes message pointers for all messages to system users regardless of media type.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,500,938 issued Mar. 19, 1996, and filed Mar. 7, 1994, discloses computer software for signaling a user through a changing cursor and directly specifying the start and stop times for meetings scheduled on an electronic calendar. The computer system includes a pointing device such as, for example, a mouse. A user positions a pointer in a predesignated time selection area of a calendar displayed in a computer monitor using a pointing device. A desired start time is selected along a time line of the electronic calendar by activating the pointer device. New user-oriented instructions are then automatically displayed on the pointer. The pointer is then placed at a desired stop time. Again, the user selects the time by activating the pointer.
None of the prior art discloses an electronic messaging system using structured response objects and virtual mailboxes which keep track of and report status of multi-step transactions and provide users an easy way to create transactions or provide for automatic response processing. A system that automates and facilitates every day electronic messaging transactions can act as an enabler to increase the number and complexity of transactions.